Archive for October, 2010

I will be teaching a 2-day course, 9-5 on January 10 and 11, on Privacy, Secrecy, and Censorship. This Harvard Division of Continuing Education Professional Development course is for anyone who wants to learn about the digital explosion in one short burst, for either professional or personal reasons.

Several of my colleagues are also teaching fascinating short courses in January, listed on the same web page. There are links for inquiries and registration, or just shoot me an email, to lewis@harvard.edu if you want to get info from the horse’s mouth!

My guess is that this ruling sticks if it is challenged. The legislature was given the opportunity to fix a problem and instead did what it figure would be politically popular, to legislate safety over free speech. Back to the drawing board, folks.

Some time ago I blogged about the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling that the state’s definition of “matter” did not include text messages. For that reason some creep avoided a conviction for texting a minor with some material that would have been criminal had the material been printed.

The state legislature rushed in to fix the definition. Here are the before and after definitions of “matter” taken from the state laws:

[ Definition of "Matter'' effective until July 11, 2010. For text effective July 11, 2010, see below.]

[ Definition of "Matter'' as amended by 2010, 74, Sec. 2 effective July 11, 2010. For text effective until July 11, 2010, see above.]

“Matter”, any handwritten or printed material, visual representation, live performance or sound recording including, but not limited to, books, magazines, motion picture films, pamphlets, phonographic records, pictures, photographs, figures, statues, plays, dances, or any electronic communication including, but not limited to, electronic mail, instant messages, text messages, and any other communication created by means of use of the Internet or wireless network, whether by computer, telephone, or any other device or by any transfer of signs, signals, writing, images, sounds, data, or intelligence of any nature transmitted in whole or in part by a wire, radio, electromagnetic, photo-electronic or photo-optical system.

Now that is certainly inclusive, but probably too inclusive. At least that is the argument being put forward by civil libertarians in challenging the constitutionality of the revised law. From the Associated Press (Washington Post — the Boston papers seem not to have picked up the story):

The content providers say the recent amendments amount to “a broad censorship law” that would ban from the Internet a variety of information that could be seen as harmful to minors, including material about contraception, pregnancy, literature and art that adults have a First Amendment right to view.

Michael Bamberger, an attorney who represents the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said the way the law is written, adults cannot speak freely in chat rooms “out of fear that minors will see that as well.”

Nonsense, says the Attorney General’s office.

Assistant Attorney General Jessica Barnett said the new law only prohibits the dissemination of matter that is obscene to minors under a standard set in a 2006 Supreme Court ruling, that is, when the person sending the material specifically intends to disseminate it to someone under the age of 18.

“Absent intent to specifically send it to a minor, there is no crime,” Barnett said.

The problem is you can’t tell who is viewing a web page; nor can you control what web pages Massachusetts children are viewing that come from way beyond the horizon of Massachusetts Law. This all looks like yet another quixotic child-protection statute that will not protect children but will arm prosecutors with a handy tool to go after people saying things they don’t like.

The Wall Street Journal reports on leakage of Facebook data to the advertising world, even data held behind what were supposed to be Facebook’s highest level of privacy settings.

Why does this keep happening? Surely not by design on Facebook’s part. The company has been bitten enough times over the past year not to be venal without good cause. I have much less confidence in the intermediaries in the leakage, the data aggregation firm Rapleaf for example, which pled that “We didn’t do it on purpose.” Uh-huh.

Facebook is not just a social network any more. It is an entire operating system on top of which applications run. If you take it with a grain of salt and a roll of the eyes that Windows still has bugs, you should not be surprised that Facebook has bugs. And the more innovative and experimental a computer system is the more likely it is to be buggy.

Of course, any software developer does a risk-reward calculation. The people who build air traffic control systems do more careful testing (and more careful design up front) than the people who build social networking sites, because the harm to the company of a failure is lower, and the benefit to the company of a success is higher. Absent liability for privacy failures, Facebook will keep producing neat products that people love, and patching them when someone points out their problems.

Good job by the WSJ journalists, one of whom, Geoff Fowler, was a reporter for the Harvard Crimson (see this piece on diversity, for example), and also a student in my Bits course when he was an undergraduate at Harvard.